Wednesday, November 25, 2009

...and now a word from our sponsors...

We never watch a television show live. We record the ones we like on Tivo and then watch them on a delayed basis, sometimes as soon as 30 minutes after they start. We do this so we can skip through the commercials. Tonight we were watching the most recent episode of "V". My finger seemed to be getting tired from an inordinate amount of commercials. When the program ended, I decided to do a little analysis. We went back to the beginning of the program and recorded the amount of program time vs commercials. There were 5 commercials totaling 20 minutes during the 60 minute show.

In the 1960s, an average 60 minute show would run for 51 minutes. Thats 11 minutes longer than tonights episode of "V". That means commercial time has increased from 9 minutes to 20 minutes for an hour long show. That's a 222 percent increase in commercial time! If you watch any of the old shows that are being broadcast, you may see that they've cut up to 9 minutes of showtime for the increased commercials.

Not only are they increasing the amount of commercials, they are increasing the volume because they know that people head to the kitchen or bathroom during commercials. They want to make sure that you hear them in other parts of the house.

What can we do about this? It's not going to go away. They know that people will see the commercial and buy the advertised product. We can purchase the show through services such as iTunes or Amazon, but then we have to store the show and pay $2.99 or $3.99 for each episode. Hardly worth it for something you can get for free. We can wait and buy the DVDs for the season. Again, it's expensive and you need to store the DVDs that you'll probably never watch again.

The ideal solution would be to turn off the TV and do something productive. But hey, I like to watch some of the shows. Is something wrong with that? It's entertainment. I will just sit back and realize that by pressing the fast forward button until my finger gets sore is saving me about $3.99 for every 40 minutes of TV I watch. Let's see, I press the fast forward for 20 minutes of recording time. since it's fast forwarding at 3x normal speed, I'm only holding the button for about 7 minutes. If my calculations are correct, I'm earning $34.22 an hour for sitting in my recliner, pushing a button.